Indigeny and Energetics is a redefinition of the historical process of the development of the sacred human relationship to land and nature. This relationship is universal, a global naturo-spiritual dynamic with social, political, technological and environmental ramifications. Application of these concepts redefines the primacy and importance of the indigenous human experience and projects a positive human developmental outcome that cannot take place without this redefinition.

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The Why of It...

Indigeny & Energetics: The Why of It...

(originally posted Sept. 24, 2010)

There are (at least) two important and related reasons why Indigeny and Energetics is important to me and hopefully, as an idea and more than an idea, to others. It is simple in its intellectual abstraction and quite complex in the projection of its present and future manifestations to engage the old, tested, tried and true concepts that surround and ground indigeny and spiritual underpinnings that have kept it in its state of balanced power for the millions of years that it has been developing, growing and defining itself. At the moment, these two dynamics present themselves as a key binary or juxtaposition that helps us to understand the necessity of embracing the fundamental indigenous nature of humanity and how the break from that relationship to land, nature and Spirit, the dissolution of the "naturo-spiritual (human) dynamic", has affected us as a global human body and a universal Spirit embodied.

1) Indigenous cultural life and spiritual traditions have been interrupted, distorted, distracted, destroyed, dismembered and derailed by the colonial, mercantilist/capitalist, patriarchical, secularizing process of modernization set in motion by Europeans and others in the last more than five hundred years. Even current news and other reports about indigenous people show clearly that issues of biopiracy, environmental abuse and land misappropriation, of intercultural violence and oppression, capitalist pathologies, of racism, sexism, homophobia and classism are indeed, still, weighing heavily upon the compromised resources of indigeny all over the world.

Whether it is the attacks upon Ngobe life and culture by the mining companies, the brutality of the neo-colonial police against the Samburu, the continued dissolution of Dagara culture by French-led imperialistic modernity or the sustained and criminal holding of land, resources and intellectual property of the Native American peoples from Tierra del Fuego to Baffin Bay, the insidious nature of modern, scientized, capitalist anti-life wreaks havoc on a body of culture, a humano-spiritual legacy that is the life-blood of our existence. This life-blood pumps powerfully driven even in the presence of the medium-techism of computers, artificial intelligence (boy, that title should tell you something about its efficacy!), virtual reality (and isn't THAT a hint and a half?!), android phones, iPads, ebooks, genetic engineering and other forms of materialist, scientific god-ism. This life-blood is pumping, though, with great difficulty, through neo-pseudo-cultural veins impacted with narrow discourse, confusion, distraction, media-deification and the onslaught of secular cultural practices that devalue life, devalue and desacrate nature and humanity all at once - as all is related, all are related.

It would be one thing to be able to confidently go along with the modern, liberal, christo-secular assertion that modernity is a natural(ized) development out of the primitivism of inferior indigenous realities. How many times have we had to listen to the cruel joke anthropological insult that indigenous people are simple, child-like (as if that is actually a negative thing to be?!) and without "industry" and proper modern accumulative motivations? After all, when the European invaders were showing up on the shores of Amerique, many saw 'nothing' being done with the land, that it was empty of mercantilist conjurings and machinations, that it was devoid of the death-kiss of their currency-god.

It is another thing to recognize that modernity is being pulled into the intellectual and spiritual vacuum of its own creation, drawn back to the rainforests of South America to beg cures for modern-made diseases of excess and sinful imbalance that run rampant despite the stated power of the information super-sidewalk. So many modern people are turning toward indigenous spiritual traditions for healing, for socio-spiritual change, to balance the madness and sometimes to make themselves look good in front of their friends or to soothe their own subconscious selves for the sins of their forefathers and foremothers. So much of the work around global cooling is dependent upon recognizing that the indigenous people had it right before "we" made it wrong. Even though we generally aren't admitting it, sustainability is an indigenous concept at its core, in its essence and modern myopia and obnoxious intellectualism prevents us from acknowledging that FACT and, thus, truly enabling ourselves to manifest the concept in a grounded and conscious, informed and humble way. Modernity is turning to indigeny for its own salvation, but at this moment, is doing so, in many ways, as a slaveholder would turn to its captives to help it put out the fire in the master's house. And there are many people engaging Native American and other indigenous traditions for the absolute right reasons, in the best of ways. For this, we can be truly grateful to Spirit and the Ancestors for leading back onto the path Home.

2)The power-in-balance legacy of indigeny is a continuous timeless river of incontrovertible life-giving water. Indigeny is still here. Indigeny is not going away. Indigeny is not just a good idea, but the best way for us to be and become. Modern narratives revel in the last of things like "Mohicans" and "Dogmen", as if the positive valuation of those last, disempowered, but glamorized, romanticized relics were the primitivized reincarnations of the god of individualism that is the lyrical hook in the chorus of the swan song of it anti-creation narrative. Modernity and all of the containers and contained that it has spawned is the historical anomaly, even in the face of the beautiful artifice it has kept up (you've seen "Matrix", right?) and the intellectual bullying that keeps us saying 'yes' to its constant insanity. Modernity is the alternative to the conventions of indigeny and energetics. It is, again, simple and correct to say that, popularly, indigeny is 3 million years in the research, development and implementation process, that it is a system that not only DID work, but DOES work, hence the harried and humbling searches for the "new" (and improved?) in the old, for the "hot" in the cool river of timeless circularity that indigeny represents and is. Indigeny was not only a good idea, but it was and is good practice. It is that philosophical and practical way of being defined by a full-frontal, deep-immersion engagement of the balance of All That Is, of all the things that we have been trying to capture on hard drives, in coded computerese, in his-story books and our modernized minds in the interest of regaining, again, that balance that was there before modernity set it on its historicized, temporal ear in the first place.

Indigeny in general, as I've always said about Africa in particular, would have been fine without the criminal incursion of the "new idea", the "improved" and christianized concept of the European business model, which USAmerican corporatocracy is just a more organized synthesis of. Indigeny didn't need to be destroyed or deterred to be proven "right". It did not need the burden of such proof...and did not deserve the pain and horror of such proof, still being played out in the villages and towns of developing and developed (can we really call them that?....seriously?!?) machi-nations. What indigeny represents is much bigger than the substance of modernity and capitalist patriarchy. The image of modernity seems much bigger and it must be understood in that perspective. What we are seeing is sleight of man, the artificially intelligent virtual fooling of the senses through quantitative overload and overstimulation (see what Mander has to say in "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television) which actually shuts us down, numbs us and is exactly what is sending us running roughshod into the eco-tourized rainforests and sweat lodges and African villages (or worse, into the glamorized African "safari" because Africa is just a hell-hole of humanity with some really great animals to look at...do you see how functional this modern mind and eye-set is?) for our dear and waning lives.

Indigeny and energetics would still be alive and well today if modernity had never been thought up and thrust upon the world, upon the loving Earth Mother, like the hyper-masculine phallo-weapon that it is. And not just because of this gendered energetic imbalance, we are called to re-engage, re-value, re-validate, re-empower the feminine in all things, in men, in women, in those that entered humanity on multiple sacred points on the gender continuum, the gatekeepers. We must bring indigeny back to its original and then a new vitality. It will never be the same, but it must ever be. To allow it to be destroyed is to allow ourselves to be destroyed. We must allow the life-blood of humanity to flow powerfully again.

And what is one of the greatest causes of death in the modern world, other than the metastasization of unexpressed grief? Heart disease.

If indigeny dies, humanity will die. Energetics, the sum total of all of the spiritual praxis of indigeny, is the heart of indigeny.

Indigeny must live. At the very, very least, modernity must get out of the way.

About Me

Ukumbwa Sauti, M.Ed. is a professor of cultural media studies, a facilitator of cultural media literacy and is fully engaged in research in areas of nature, media, indigenous culture and spirituality and the effects of modernity on the indigenous soul. He is trained in Indigenous African Spiritual Technologies in the Dagara tradition by Malidoma Some’ and Alwyn Thomas that includes ritual, numerology and divination. Ukumbwa completed the Dagara Elder Initiation in July of 2009. Ukumbwa is a member of East Coast Village in Cherry Plain, NY and a growing number of spiritual individuals and communities that are brave enough to know that the sustenance of human life on this earth is based upon a different and traditional, indigenous relationship with Nature and Spirit.
Ukumbwa is committed to engaging people and communities everywhere in a dialogue, a multilogue that informs, inspires, challenges and motivates us toward progressive and healing and balanced human behaviors with regard to each other and the natural world around us.